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Horizons, v. 6, issue 1, whole no. 20, September 1944

Page 11

                      Man Sagt

      Since inscribing the preceding, I have received two items which are either port- or pre-mailings; fan historians will doubtless be arguing over the matter of which mailing The FAPA Bulletin belongs to for the next three or four generation. Said FAPA Bulletin is very encouraging indication that Larry is taking his job and responsibilities seriously, and not, as I'd feared, letting a little thing like college interfere with his duties. This attitude, which the Futurians would probably call dynamic, is very sorely needed just now, especially when it comes to discussing the actions of Walter J. Daugherty, as applied to both the FAPA and the NFFF.
       Waich brings us naturally to the new edition of the Directory of Fandom. It is a vast improvement over the original attempt, and if Walter J. used his own money in production, I can say little harsh. (If he used NFFF funds, on the other hand, I want to start kicking at the earliest possible opportunity.) The only trouble is, there are the same old names of fans of whom no one has ever heard, and people who certainly are not fans like Matthew Huxkey and who might be alienated from fandom completely by the stuff they'll receive through their name appearing here in. And once again, the addresses are in many cases hopelessly antiquated; it'll never be safe to use the directory without checking it against some other source of information. Worst of all is the way service fans are handled. Many of them have home addresses included which are no longer valid because their parents or mum relatives have moved. The only logical method would have been that of listing their names in the general section, leaving the following two lines blank, which would have violated no address-publishing regulations, and left users of the Directory free to fill in current addresses as he ran across them in correspondence or other fanzines.
        My estimation of Walt would go up half a dozen points if he'd prepare a really thorough list of corrections, and mail it to all who received the original work, in order that changes might be pencilled in the proper places. I'd be glad to help the project to the extent of at least thirty more recent addresses and correct spellings of names.
                      - - - - - - - - 
         I had hoped to fill these last two pages with some sort of feature article, but Larry's grim and welcome warning that the deadline will be observed makes it necessary to get a move on and complete the issue but quick. Therefore, it'll be mere chattering.
        One chattering point would be in defense of the stories of Ray Bradbury, at whom a number of fans have been pointing the finger of ridivule because of his harping on children, and particular small boys, in the stories he's selling with such regularity. Sour grapes, and nothing more, seems responsible for most of these wisecracks. Me, I haven't read all of Bradbury's published stories, but of those I've gone over, have yet to find one that wasn't considerably above the level of today's average magazine fiction, and one of them--about a reaper, in Weird Tales possibly eighteen months ago--was genuinely great.
        The fact is, Ray is doing the very wise thing of finding a good type and making that peculiarly his own. The use of children in weird and fantasy fiction has been very limited; Lewis Carroll's "Alice", "Mimsy Were the Borogoves", "The Turn of the Screw", and a little short story in Unknow about a small boy who exorcised a devil by means of holy water in his squirtguri, are the only successful cases I can recall. In my book, Ray Bradbury is the finest writer yet to come out of fandom. (This, naturally, does not include when who had some interest in fandom at one time, but were primarily authors, like John W. Campbell, Jr. Ray is a Native Son.)
           The year 1944 ought to become known in fannals as Suggestion Twelvemonth. For we've had a powerfully long series of suggested projects for fandom, some of them big enough to occupy dozens of hard-working fans for years, like the Great Bib that Anthony Boucher, I believed, proposed in a recent Shangri-L' Affaires. The odd part about it is that all this has come about parely voluntarily, whereas

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Man Sagt Since inscribing the preceding, I have received two items which are either port- or pre-mailings; fan historians will doubtless be arguing over the matter of which mailing The FAPA Bulletin belongs to for the next three or four generation. Said FAPA Bulletin is very encouraging indication that Larry is taking his job and responsibilities seriously, and not, as I'd feared, letting a little thing like college interfere with his duties. This attitude, which the Futurians would probably call dynamic, is very sorely needed just now, especially when it comes to discussing the actions of Walter J. Daugherty, as applied to both the FAPA and the NFFF. Waich brings us naturally to the new edition of the Directory of Fandom. It is a vast improvement over the original attempt, and if Walter J. used his own money in production, I can say little harsh. (If he used NFFF funds, on the other hand, I want to start kicking at the earliest possible opportunity.) The only trouble is, there are the same old names of fans of whom no one has ever heard, and people who certainly are not fans like Matthew Huxkey and who might be alienated from fandom completely by the stuff they'll receive through their name appearing here in. And once again, the addresses are in many cases hopelessly antiquated; it'll never be safe to use the directory without checking it against some other source of information. Worst of all is the way service fans are handled. Many of them have home addresses included which are no longer valid because their parents or mum relatives have moved. The only logical method would have been that of listing their names in the general section, leaving the following two lines blank, which would have violated no address-publishing regulations, and left users of the Directory free to fill in current addresses as he ran across them in correspondence or other fanzines. My estimation of Walt would go up half a dozen points if he'd prepare a really thorough list of corrections, and mail it to all who received the original work, in order that changes might be pencilled in the proper places. I'd be glad to help the project to the extent of at least thirty more recent addresses and correct spellings of names. - - - - - - - - I had hoped to fill these last two pages with some sort of feature article, but Larry's grim and welcome warning that the deadline will be observed makes it necessary to get a move on and complete the issue but quick. Therefore, it'll be mere chattering. One chattering point would be in defense of the stories of Ray Bradbury, at whom a number of fans have been pointing the finger of ridivule because of his harping on children, and particular small boys, in the stories he's selling with such regularity. Sour grapes, and nothing more, seems responsible for most of these wisecracks. Me, I haven't read all of Bradbury's published stories, but of those I've gone over, have yet to find one that wasn't considerably above the level of today's average magazine fiction, and one of them--about a reaper, in Weird Tales possibly eighteen months ago--was genuinely great. The fact is, Ray is doing the very wise thing of finding a good type and making that peculiarly his own. The use of children in weird and fantasy fiction has been very limited; Lewis Carroll's "Alice", "Mimsy Were the Borogoves", "The Turn of the Screw", and a little short story in Unknow about a small boy who exorcised a devil by means of holy water in his squirtguri, are the only successful cases I can recall. In my book, Ray Bradbury is the finest writer yet to come out of fandom. (This, naturally, does not include when who had some interest in fandom at one time, but were primarily authors, like John W. Campbell, Jr. Ray is a Native Son.) The year 1944 ought to become known in fannals as Suggestion Twelvemonth. For we've had a powerfully long series of suggested projects for fandom, some of them big enough to occupy dozens of hard-working fans for years, like the Great Bib that Anthony Boucher, I believed, proposed in a recent Shangri-L' Affaires. The odd part about it is that all this has come about parely voluntarily, whereas